Same War, Different Textbooks: Reading History Backwards, Through the Looking-Glass

Something's Off, No. 61 🌿
by Chigaya ("just an ordinary woman from down the street")

Imagine, for a moment, that only one TV news channel could be picked up anywhere in Japan. 🙄 Getting the same news no matter where you live sounds convenient, and fair. But what if that one channel started broadcasting false information, or one-sided opinions? We would have nothing to compare it with, and all of us would be fooled at the very same time. What truly frightens me is that this kind of danger has already seeped into our daily lives without our noticing.

A while ago, I wrote that the information we adults receive is bent to suit someone's convenience. Today's story goes deeper, further upstream. What if the very history that children learn first, before they know anything at all, has been rewritten to suit the state? That is a far more deep-rooted and serious problem than adults being fooled.

Let me be honest from the start. This story is not written to blame America. Quite the opposite. By the time you finish reading, I hope it comes through that I wrote this not to give anyone a reason to hate, but so that none of us has to. I'll explain why at the very end.

◇ The Same War, Learned in Reverse

It started with a conversation. Someone raised in America and someone raised in Japan turned out to have learned about the very same war from opposite ends.

Japanese children learn it roughly like this: Japan was living peacefully until the Black Ships arrived and forced the country open. Later, its oil was cut off, its iron was cut off, and economic sanctions drove it into a corner. There was no choice left but to fight, and in the end, atomic bombs were dropped and it was over.

American children start with Pearl Harbor. One morning, Japan launched a surprise attack on a naval base in Hawaii. A sneak attack. That's where the war begins, in that order. So why had Japan been driven into such a corner in the first place? The reasons leading up to it hardly appear at all… 💢

This isn't just my personal impression. Researchers from the University of London and the University of Oxford compared history textbooks from Japan, the United States, Britain, and Sweden ※1. According to their study, American textbooks focus heavily on the Pacific War from Pearl Harbor onward, with almost no analysis of why Japan went to war, while Japanese textbooks go all the way back to the Manchurian Incident of 1931 and describe the economic sanctions and the oil embargo. So even for the same war, where you draw the line for its "beginning" differs from country to country.

The person I was talking with grew up in America and only encountered Japanese history after coming to Japan. That was where they first learned that Japan's oil supply had been cut off ※2, and their first reaction was, "That's a lie!" But as they read more deeply into the history, they came around: "I see." In the textbooks of the country where they grew up, that one line had simply never been written…

Now, there's one fact I want to be clear about. Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. That is beyond question. Japan, too, used military force in the past. This cannot be denied, and everything that follows starts from that premise.

That said, Japan did not simply charge in blindly, for no reason. Japan had its reasons too, reasons it felt it could not back down from. Even for everyday quarrels, we have a saying in Japanese: kenka ryōseibai, "in a fight, both sides are to blame." In most conflicts, both sides have their case. So isn't it dangerous to hear only one side and decide, "They're 100% in the wrong!"? And this isn't only about history long past. Even the wars we watch in real time on TV and online often reach us only as "the voice from one side." I find myself thinking that, again and again.

Take the news about Iran, for example. To begin with, very little of it even reaches us here in Japan. 😕 This is one of the things that bothers me most, the kind of thing that makes me scratch my head and think, "something's off." In America itself, a great many ordinary citizens oppose their own country's war. In poll after poll, more than half say they're against it (※3 sources are listed at the end of this article). In other words, it's not that America as a nation, its people as a whole, wants war. The ones pushing for war are only some in the government. Most ordinary Americans, living their ordinary lives, are saying "no." It's just that their voices hardly reach us here in Japan. This is really strange 💢 An ally when it's convenient, the news quietly pulled when it's convenient… Before we even get to debating which country is right and which is wrong: are we even being allowed to hear the other side's case in the first place? We're not, are we? 😕 That's what I'd like you to stop and question, just once.

◇ How Does the Side That Did It Teach What It Did?

This is one of the big things I wanted to write about today. In No. 47 of this blog, I wrote, from the Japanese point of view, about what America did to Japan after the war. Today, I want to flip that around. How does America, "the side that did it," record the same events in its own textbooks? I got curious and looked into it, and what I found astonished me.

In American textbooks, the occupation of Japan is overwhelmingly told as a great success story ※4. 😣 It's written up as "the most successful occupation in history," the one that "won the peace" after the war, and MacArthur appears as "a merciful, magnificent general." Democracy, a new constitution, women's right to vote, land reform, education reform: America "gave" them all to Japan. It reads just like the story of a lovely gift. Even the education reform is recorded as a good deed: "we changed it from rote memorization and brainwashing into an education that nurtures children's independence." (Steam is coming out of my ears right now… holding it in 🥵)

On the other side is the hidden part of this history, the kind I introduced in No. 47, "Japan Was a Country to Be Proud Of" (please give it a read 🫠): making children black out their own textbooks with ink; handing out several million copies of a new history textbook that America made ※5; issuing an order to weaken the influence of Shinto shrines (the Shinto Directive); strictly checking the news and even personal letters (censorship) ※6. These inconvenient parts, the fact that America controlled the memories and the words of the other side, Japan, hardly appear in the textbooks American children read.

One very important distinction, though.

America hasn't turned its occupation of Japan into something that never happened. It is taught in school. It's just that the part where America looks like a hero (teaching Japan democracy) gets the spotlight, while the part where it looks like a ruler (rewriting Japan's memory, censoring the news) is quietly tucked away. Not erasing everything, but picking out only the parts that are convenient. It makes me sigh… but to be honest, I have to tell you that we Japanese do exactly the same thing. So I'll write about it.

Japanese textbooks explain in detail why Japan was driven to attack Pearl Harbor (the oil cutoff and so on), but only lightly touch on what was done to Japan under the occupation (the censorship and the inked-out textbooks, the story from No. 47). It's exactly the same mechanism. Laid out side by side, it looks like this:

・America: what was done to it (the Pearl Harbor attack) is featured prominently / what it did (rewriting memory, censorship) is barely mentioned

・Japan: what was done to it (the Black Ships, the oil cutoff, the atomic bombs) is featured prominently / the "rewiring of hearts and minds" done to it (the censorship and inked-out textbooks under the occupation, the story from No. 47) is only lightly taught, even in Japanese textbooks

Both countries hand their children only the parts where they look like the right, good country. A moth-eaten history, with holes gnawed here and there, turns out not to be only the losing side's story. The winning side, too, has left holes where its own inconvenient deeds should be, in what it teaches its own children. And even Japan, the side it was done to, doesn't teach its children in detail what was done to it. Just to be clear: I don't want to blame America. I understand why any country wants its children to be proud of their country. Parents everywhere in the world surely feel the same. That's exactly why I can't point at just one country and say, "That country is sneaky!"

But precisely because of that, there's one last question I want to ask you. Japan launched the attack back then. That's a fact, and I accept it fully. But does losing a war really mean the winner may go so far as to remake what goes on inside the heads of that country's children? That is a different kind of thing altogether from burning a city in an air raid. It doesn't just wound the body. It reshapes the inside of a person: how they feel, what they hold dear, how they live. Did the winning country truly have the right to go that far? I can't answer that. If you think it over in your own way, that's enough for me. To be honest, I feel it was something close to brainwashing. But that's only how I personally feel.

◇ The Scariest Thing Is Not Noticing

Having written all this, let me say a little about what I think is the scariest thing of all. (It may sound a bit dramatic, but it really matters (/ω＼))

Obvious manipulation isn't scary, because it gets caught right away 🤪. What's truly scary is control so skillful that no one notices they're being steered. When everyone faces the same direction, it stops feeling unnatural. It simply becomes "normal," becomes "everyday." It becomes part of life, and then it becomes like the air. And we don't go around doubting the air we breathe, do we? Remember the news at the start, the single channel that reaches the whole country. When there's only one, even if it's slanted, there's nothing to compare it with, so you can't notice. And we've been living like that for eighty years now.

So if we've been slow to wake up, it's not because we're lazy. We just got too used to it. Of course we did.

◇ But Some Things Could Not Be Taken

That's been a lot of dark talk. Let's turn things around now ✨

So much was tampered with. Our education, our faith, even our words were put on hold. And yet, there is something that could never be taken. It's the "sense we carry in daily life" that I wrote about in No. 47. Putting your hands together in gratitude. Not littering. Waiting your turn in line. Being willing to give of yourself for someone who comes after you. Precisely because none of this is set by law or written in any textbook, no one can stop it. Even when schools stopped teaching it, it was passed down at home, in the neighborhood, generation after generation. (By now, of course, I think it's in us like DNA.)

For example, after taking off your shoes 👟 at the entrance, you turn them to face outward so they're easy to step into next time. Not just taking them off, but thinking of the next person, and of your own next move. Keeping the line between inside and outside neat and orderly. Or the attitude of wa wo motte tōtoshi to nasu, "harmony is to be valued above all." Rather than pushing your own claims through, you put the harmony of the whole first. It's sometimes called indecisiveness, but it is also a quiet wisdom for avoiding conflict and keeping things running smoothly. Or the phrase okagesama de, "thanks to you." The sense that your success or your health isn't yours alone, but that you're kept going by the people around you and by unseen support (kage, literally "shade" or "shadow"). No one ever gave an order for any of this, and yet it has carried on all along.

Bushido, I think, is one of these too. Nowadays it's often taken narrowly, as a word only about samurai or martial arts. But when Nitobe Inazo wrote Bushido in English in 1900 and introduced it to the world, he presented it not as a way of fighting, but as each person's way of living, their morality. The Hagakure, Miyamoto Musashi's The Book of Five Rings, the precepts Yamaoka Tesshu wrote down: none of them was a single rulebook handed out by someone. Each was written and left behind by the person themselves. By the way, there is also a reading of the character "bu" (武) not as fighting, but as "the power to give birth, to create." (Mr. Araya Takashi talks about this.) For some reason, I'm strongly drawn to that reading.

And at the very bottom of us, there's a feeling like this: "Inside a single grain of rice 🍚 live seven gods." I think many people grew up being told that as children. No one can prove why it's seven. But that's fine, isn't it? The feeling that even a single grain of rice holds gods turns into something concrete, "I can't waste food," and it still lives in our bodies today. Japan's gods have no fixed names, no fixed number. In the kitchen, in the mountains, in the sea, and if you go that far, even on the stairs and in the futon, they really are everywhere. Whether there's one or a thousand, we don't even know.

There are great gods, like those of Ise Grand Shrine, and since not everyone can travel all the way to Ise, at New Year's we also visit our local guardian deity (ujigami). Big gods and small gods, faraway gods and nearby gods, they're all right there. That's completely different from the Western God, who has a name and exists alone in heaven. That's why, I think, we don't see our gods as beings to be worshipped and feared. Haven't they become so close that when you bang your knee on the dresser, you blurt out, "Ow! God, that's mean 😥"? And yet, on a day when you've done something you feel guilty about, you somehow think, "Ah, that's the gods punishing me." Even when no one is watching, we feel that ohtentosama, the Sun above 🌞, is watching. Even people who say "I'm not religious" when asked about religion carry this feeling deep in their bodies. It has melted in so naturally that they don't even notice they "believe," don't you think?

Kamidana (household Shinto altars) are common in homes that run a business, but plenty of homes don't have one. And yet, putting your hands together for those who've passed away happens in just about every home. Even without a butsudan (a household Buddhist altar), people put out a photo, offer flowers, ring the little bell, light a candle, and burn incense. "Dad, you loved this, didn't you." "Please watch over us." They talk to them. Instead of "God, watch over me," I'm sure many people say, "Mom, watch over me." For that person, the one who's gone is always right beside them, staying close. Maybe that already makes them a god. This is just my own private notion 🫠, but I think the dead become gods little by little, over time. They become ancestors, and eventually melt into that "god who is everywhere." That's how it feels to me. Having no fixed rules doesn't mean we do nothing. Quite the opposite. In our home, every morning we offer water and tea, and the very first rice cooked that day, served in a dish kept just for that. Not going somewhere once a week to pay a visit, but having them in our daily life every day, as a matter of course. Of course, when hard things pile up, there are days we grumble, "Is there no god, no Buddha at all?" But that's just grumbling, the kind you let slip precisely because they're so close. And however much we grumble, I doubt anyone would actually throw out their kamidana or butsudan over it.

No one from outside could ever take these roots from us. Our forebears held on to them through every kind of day and kept protecting them, and that's why they've been handed down to us.

This feeling shows up here and there in daily life. Serving freshly cooked rice neatly in the bowl. At a crosswalk with no light, giving a quick little bow, a "pekori," to the car that stopped for you. The pedestrian has the right of way, so it's really their due, and yet they still say "thank you" and bow. Even small children, when they're let across first, give a tiny bob of the head, a "chokon." Not because someone is watching. Not because they were taught. It just comes out, from somewhere deep in the body. It's lovely to see, even for us Japanese 🤗

I've lived in two countries, and traveled to a few others. But that pekori, bowing your head to the one who stopped even though it was your right, I hardly remember seeing it anywhere else. That's exactly why, I think, it looks a little mysterious to people from outside. It's something too ordinary for us to see. And besides, reasoning aside, the driver who stopped feels kind of good getting that little pekori too. We're only human. That's how it has kept going, I think.

◇ Those From Outside Can See It

Here's where something strange happens.

The things Japanese people can no longer see because they're too ordinary are exactly what people from outside see best.

Take Koizumi Yakumo, who came to Japan about 130 years ago under the name Lafcadio Hearn. He fell in love with the small sacredness in daily life that Japanese people barely give a second glance, became Japanese himself, and wrote it all down. He didn't come to take. He came because he fell in love, and he came to look.

Mr. Inabo Inabo of Palau, whom I wrote about before on this blog, is the same. A man from another country, from the side that had fought alongside Japan, named Japan's roots as "the Emperor, Yasukuni Shrine, Mount Fuji, and the cherry blossoms," and cherished them more than the Japanese themselves. On August 15, 1995, on the approach to Yasukuni Shrine, Mr. Inabo said, in the Japanese he had learned: "Look. There are no young people here." It was someone from outside who pointed to the very place where Japanese people had stopped remembering their own country's dead.

And now, more and more people from abroad who have really learned Japanese and fallen in love with Japan are showing up in videos. They see Japanese daily life and manners as something found nowhere else. They are trying to understand it as something fresh, and somehow sacred. What those who came to take could not see, those who came out of love see clearly.

From Hearn 130 years ago, through Mr. Inabo, to the young people of today: people who find Japan's roots from outside have always been there, unbroken.

Those who came to take couldn't see it. Those who came out of love can. At that point, surely we can be friends. And friendship isn't about who won and who lost, is it? A friend cherishes what you hold most dear. That alone is enough to make winning and losing, and even borders, lose their meaning.

This is just my own imagining, and I can't quite put it into words. But maybe what the people before us tried to protect, at the cost of their lives, was something like this. Someone says, "I love Japan." You accept it with a "thank you." And then you talk together, in peace. Maybe that was the kind of connection they were hoping for. …That's what I think.

◇ So We Learn. Not in Order to Hate.

As I said at the start, this is not a story to blame America.

If it ended with "America is sneaky," it would just be manufacturing a conflict that was never really there. Between the people of Japan and the people of America, there is no real reason to hate each other. I have friends and relatives in America too. The complications are always between governments.

It all began with a war. That's a fact. But the ones editing children's history to suit themselves were the Japanese government and the American government alike. If so, then the Japanese and American people are, in a sense, victims of the same thing. Those at the top wrote the story, and those of us below took it in without any way to question it. Neither people is to blame.

So I don't want to use this history to blame anyone. Once you see that on both sides the editors are "governments," you realize that we ordinary people were on the same side all along. We learn not in order to blame, but so that we don't have to.

We call America our "ally" now. But as long as both countries keep teaching their children the convenient version, it's an alliance between two countries whose histories are both moth-eaten. Holding hands, while neither knows the real story of the other. Unless we come to know each other's real story, I don't think we can become true allies. Knowing isn't for the sake of hating. I think it's for the sake of truly joining hands.

◇ Pass It On, or Drop It

Finally, let me tell you the biggest story of all.

Japan has the oldest continuous dynasty in the world, even counting only what's in the historical record. Tracing only what historians can reliably confirm, it goes back about 1,500 years, and Guinness World Records recognizes the Imperial House of Japan as "the oldest hereditary monarchy" ※7. (Going back to the myths, the history is even longer, but here I'm sticking to what is certain.) This baton, carried for 1,500 years, has been handed to the next generation by every generation so far, without once being dropped. But here, let me honestly write down what I'm afraid of.

It's that our generation might become the first to drop it. 😣 The people who lived through the war and history's turning points are almost all gone now. While there were still witnesses, they could answer even a groundless fabrication with, "No, I was there!" But as they disappear and history's footholds grow thin, convenient fabrications are being poured into the gap as freely as anyone likes. And the hands trying to rewrite history still haven't stopped. At this rate, believing Japan to be "the country that lost" and "the country that was in the wrong," never learning our real history, never able to pass it on, we ourselves might become the dark chapter in that long history…

But this is what I think. If our generation is the one that lets history break off, then the ones who can reconnect it are also none other than us. The deepest layer of our history is still there, so we can still return to where it started. Before the witnesses are gone, we need to touch the real history with our own hands, now. And I think we can also borrow the eyes of people abroad who feel drawn to Japan.

That's why I wanted this article to be readable in English, too. To hand Japan's history over, just once, to an outside and objective view, and then, through those outside eyes, bring it back to ourselves. There should be room for this kind of "reverse import." The holes in our history can surely be filled in again, whether with our own hands or by borrowing an outside perspective. That our history was left full of holes, and that we didn't notice for eighty whole years, I find truly galling. But I don't want this feeling to end as mere frustration. Whether we stand on the side that lets history break off, or on the side that passes it on to the future: the only ones who can decide that are us, the people living now. I want to stand on the side that passes it on. Shall we make our generation the one that ends this break in history?

◇ We've Seen Through the Trick

Yesterday, I wrote about the media: how the information we receive quietly leads us toward whatever someone wants us to see.

Today was the reverse. We were quietly led to look away from what they didn't want us to see. Only the direction is different. The technique is the same. Pulling us toward what they want shown, or steering us away from what they don't, both are the same nudge: "Keep looking this way, okay?" …We've already seen through the trick. 😕

If that's so, I think there's only one thing we can do.

We have to go and get the truth ourselves. Neither the moth-eaten history nor the treasure no one could take will be handed to us if we just wait. It only comes to those who go and get it.

And that treasure is truly precious, something to be proud of, something that shines ✨. And yet so many people don't even know it's there. …What a waste. I want to tell the people of Japan most of all. And I'd love for people outside Japan to know more about it too.

So, at the very end, I want to call out to all of you in Japan. You don't need any difficult theory. Just take a little peek at the real story first. Beneath our feet, something far more radiant than we imagine lies sleeping. Won't you come and dig it up with me? And let's make sure the same thing never happens again. …That's what I want to tell you.

◇ For Readers Outside Japan

And finally, to you, reading from outside Japan.

Reading this for the first time, you may have been surprised. Some of you may even have felt offended. Even so, thank you for reading to the end.

What I wrote today is only a small part of the history we ourselves were never taught. Even now, many Japanese people don't know it. And because of these holes, more than a few have come to hang their heads about their own country. That's what I believe.

But if it stays that way… it's far too unfair to the people who lived through the war. What happened in an age before social media gets used however others please. That's exactly why I believe the history of a war that really happened, the good and the bad together, is something we ought to know.

If you're someone who holds Japan dear, there's one thing, just one, that only you can do. In Japan, there are so many young people who can't bring themselves to care about politics or history. When we Japanese say the very same words, for some reason they just don't get through. But your words, the words of someone who loves Japan, might make those young people turn and look for the first time. So that the Japan you came to love can be handed to the next generation just as you love it. Would you please lend us a hand?🍀🍀

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[Sources]

※1 Comparative study of Japanese/US/UK/Swedish textbooks (the skew in how Pearl Harbor is treated) … research by Stuart Foster (University of London) and Jason Nicholls (University of Oxford); reported in TES.
※2 How the oil embargo came about … National Diet Library, "Modern Japan in Archives," 4-13 "Outbreak of War between Japan and the U.S." / How Pearl Harbor and the oil embargo are taught … Education About Asia (Association for Asian Studies).
※3 US public opinion on a war with Iran (a majority opposed) … Pew Research Center (March 2026) / Economist・YouGov (April 2026, 34% support, 53% oppose) / Reuters・Ipsos (March 2026, 59% disapprove) / Marist (NPR・PBS, March 2026), etc.
※4 How the Occupation is portrayed in America ("the most successful occupation," "won the peace," "gave them democracy") … MacArthur Memorial, "Occupation of Japan (1945-1952) Primary Resources" (materials for teachers) / PBS American Experience / Columbia University "Asia for Educators" / US Dept. of State, Office of the Historian / Britannica.
※5 How Kuni no Ayumi was made … MEXT "One Hundred Years of the School System" / Modern Asian Studies, "Ienaga Saburo and the First Postwar Japanese History Textbook" (Cambridge University Press).
※6 Occupation-era education, speech, and religion policy (suspension of classes, inking-out of textbooks, Kuni no Ayumi [several million copies], the Shinto Directive, the Press Code) … MEXT "One Hundred Years of the School System," etc. / Binghamton Journal of History, "Commission and Omission of History in Occupied Japan" / (related, by the same author) No. 33 and No. 47.
※7 Guinness World Records, "Oldest ruling house" (Imperial House of Japan) … guinnessworldrecords.com

・US high-school history curriculum (world history and national history taught separately) … Aralia Education, etc.
・Koizumi Yakumo (Lafcadio Hearn) … the Meiji-era writer who recorded the sacredness within Japanese daily life.
・Bushido … Nitobe Inazo, Bushido: The Soul of Japan (1900) / Hagakure (Yamamoto Tsunetomo) / Miyamoto Musashi, The Book of Five Rings / the reading of "bu" as "to give birth" traces back to Motoori Norinaga's interpretation of "take" in Kojiki-den (also discussed on the YouTube program "Limit Breaker," Oda Masayoshi × Araya Takashi, "[9 out of 10 Don't Notice] What Postwar Japanese Have Lost," published July 11, 2026).
・Mr. Inabo Inabo's speech … August 15, 1995, on the approach to Yasukuni Shrine, at the "Central National Memorial Gathering for the War Dead" (video) / interview in Nihon no Ibuki, December 1995 issue.
・(related, by the same author) No. 33, "Broken and Broken, Yet It Did Not Disappear" (June 23, 2026 / the Shinto Directive, and the stratum it could not reach).
・(related, by the same author) No. 47, "Japan Was a Country to Be Proud Of" (July 24, 2026 / the four occupation directives, what survived nonetheless, and today's Japan seen in the numbers).